A NASA worker in a clean room at the National Space Science Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama, checks out the CLASP instrument prior to shipping to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico for Sept. 3 launch. Credits: NASA/MSFC
Imagine trying to study a specific region of the sun, eg, from a vantage point some 93 M miles away, probing that area at a level of precision <0.1% – with <5 minutes to do the job. That’s what NASA’s CLASP instrument is for, a joint effort b/n US, Japan, Spain and France, that was flown Sept 3 to an altitude of 167 miles. CLASP is shorthand for the Chromospheric Lyman-Alpha Spectro-Polarimeter, a high-tech telescope that studies the sun for some 300 seconds.
During that time, CLASP will delivered the first-ever measurement of the magnetic field in the sun’s m...
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